Now I've never bee a fan of these new fangled HD formats of the past 2 years which is documented somewhere on these forums. I think the video looks slightly better and Im not an audio guy so I cant appreciate the sound.I've also learned from my feelings on the Blu format that I am blind, an idiot, a fanboy(of things that are not Blu?), that my tv is not good enough and that the colors are not calibrated correctly and all the Blus I watch are some of the low quality Blu rays....Either way I still at one point thought that it would be worth buying Blu copies of movies that I love such as the Star Wars films and some of my horror favorites.

So on my Christmas list I put down John Carpenters "The Thing" on Blu Ray. Its a great Sci Fi horror movie and I suggest anyone that enjoys horror to check it out. It is one of the single greatest presentations of practical effects of all time. My buddy got it for me and I was happy to get it

Visually its slightly better than the DVD, I compared them with both my 1080i upconverting DVD player and the PS3 itself in 1080p. I expected that after the letdown of watching other Blu rentals(I usually rent on Blu for big movies). The way I see it is DVD=90% and Blu=%100. Now the biggest letdown is..... get this..... it had LESS special features than the DVD(and the HD DVD release). The Blu has one commentary with Carpenter and Kurt Russel. The DVD(released in 2004) has an 80 minute documentary(I love my horror movie documentaries, Im a huge practical effect fan) the Russel/Carpenter documentary and an interview with the fx wizard behind most of the main props Rob Botten. Now one can only imagine that if those features werent in the DVD the bit rate could be upped due to the extra space akin to the Columbia Tristar "Superbit" releases.

WTF is this. you pay $10-$15 more and they cant even throw the extras on it. Blu Ray just keeps getting less and less appealing. As long as DVD is around I cant see me owning more than 5-10 Blu's in the formats lifetime.

Yeah, the biggest downside to Blu-Ray is you often need to check out and see if the picture quality is any good before you buy.

This is where I check:

http://www.highdefdigest.com/ (just search the general reviews)

And a good user-ranked tier system of highest to lowest quality titles:

http://forums.highdefdigest.com/blu-ray-software-general-discussion/8749-tier-system-blu-ray.html

(Sometimes the system can be a bit out of date since newer movies will almost always look better than older movies but the older movies were ranked at the time using the same system.)

(Not to mention reviewers tend to be a little bit more generous with older titles simply because it is hard for them to look as good as a modern day digital movie like Wall-E or something.)

I'm not saying it should be this complicated, but you run into the exact same problems on DVD once you become a picture quality nut. Some DVD's look just plain awful. Horrible source print, little to no removal of scratches and other defects, among other things.

Oddly enough, the reviewer here thought that the picture quality was great for an older movie. He gave it 4.5 out of 5. He's the kind of person who has a ridiculously good set-up though.  And he usually doesn't change his reviews much for a movie that was earlier done on HD-DVD and was ported to Blu-Ray (HD-DVD review was in 2006).

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/1662/thing1982.html

I usually boycott titles with no extras.  Its complete BS like you said when they don't include them.  Luckily the problem was far more prevalent in Blu-Rays early days and has more or less disappeared by now.

Ironically, Universal took the cheap route here and the HD-DVD had more extras that they cut on the Blu-Ray to squeeze it on a BD-25.  That's some major bullshit.  Pretty shameful on Universal's part.

@akuma587

HighDefDigest is a great site... one of my favorites really. I do find myself disagreeing with their movie rating though (the rating that says if the movie itself was any good).

None-the-less, great site.

I own the 1998 DVD of The Thing which is identical to the 2004 version. On ign's review of the blu-ray version it says that you can watch the extras from the previous versions as a picture in picture feature using the U-control interface. I'm glad that I haven't bought a Blu-ray player yet because it seems that most blu-ray movies just don't justify the extra $10-$15 you have to spend to upgrade. The Thing is one of my favorite movies from the 80's and I can't believe that Ennio Morricone score for this movie was nominated for a Razzie.

Thats one of the things that always puzzled me...why, if blu-ray contains so much space, are there hardly any special features on them?

@colonelstubbs
This also puzzles me especially since most blu-ray movies now use 50GB discs.

@Colonstubbs, The special features were Moneyhatted >_>

I think at the moment Blu-Ray is still mainly the preserve of videophiles. My guess would be that they are aiming at the same sort of market as buys Superbit DVDs - the decision is probably that they would prefer more bits for the video, rather than 'wasting' the space on features.

But also remember that a lot of films have had a standard DVD release, and then special editions, with a second disc full of extras. So far, I've not seen that many special edition Blu-Rays.

It all depends on the quality of the transfer. Some blu-ray titles are miles beyond their dvd counterparts in picture quality, and some just really aren't worth it.